Our reviewers' verdicts on the latest batch of paperbacks

In novels, people who keep wild birds tend to be eccentric (think of Gertrude in Gormenghast). Esther Woolfson’s house teems with them, but she is remarkably sane and this is a delightful account: ‘‘The world we share is broad, the boundaries and differences between us negligible, illusory.’’ Her graceful pet rook, Chicken, makes her think of the ‘‘fastidious conventions of courtly love’’ – though it’s not often, in my experience, that lovers put prawns down your jeans. Woolfson succeeds in showing that we are much closer to birds than we think. Philip Womack

Fidel and Che

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History is littered with chance meetings that changed the world. In July 1955, a young Argentine doctor and a rich Cuban landowner’s son met at a drinks party in Mexico City. They were Ernesto Guevara and Fidel Castro – and the rest, as Simon Reid-Henry shows in 400 pacey pages, is history. From audacious, naive beginnings in their guerilla training camps in Mexico, their radical friendship took them to the bloody attrition of armed struggle in Cuba, and their triumphant victory over Batista in 1959.

Yet just as Cuba itself was a bi-product of a 1901 treaty between the major powers, Fidel and Che’s revolutionary government found itself trapped in the labyrinth of Cold War realpolitik. Reid-Henry has crafted his narrative from a vast range of archive material, much recently declassified, producing a grippingly readable tale of two revolutionary lives. The book covers the politicians at the expense of the wider politics – but the end result is as fast and ferocious as a Molotov cocktail. Jonathan Bray

America America

by Ethan Canin

Bloomsbury, £7.99

Narrated by the oddly colourless Corey Sifter, a middle-aged journalist who grew up in the orbit of the novel’s brightest stars, this ambitious work charts the events surrounding a failed, fictional presidential run against Richard Nixon. The Democrat senator Henry Bonwiller is backed by the wealthy Metarey family, and it is the opportunities they gave Corey that made him into our narrator. He owes them a lot, and he knows it. Ethan Canin has an excellent sense of the compromises people will make for good ideas, and deftly handles the moral problems that his characters create and confront. Peter Scott

Towards Another Summer

by Janet Frame

Virago, £7.99

Janet Frame felt that this story of a cripplingly shy New Zealand writer who feels trapped in her adopted England was too personal to be published in her lifetime. It is a raw and often acutely embarrassed novel. Grace Cleave longs for home and fantasises that she is turning into a migratory bird. A half-wanted weekend trip to a journalist’s house merely increases her sense of isolation, while her dreams begin to develop a physical quality. Frame unsparingly exposes her character’s psychological flaws and reading the novel often feels like an intrusion. It is an alarming achievement. Peter Scott

In Zodiac Light

by Robert Edric

Black Swan, £7.99

Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) was an under-appreciated composer and poet whose immense talent was never realised due to the mental illness that plagued his adult life. Beginning in 1922, when Gurney was in a Dartford asylum, the novel is narrated by Irvine, a young doctor haunted by spectres of war and personal inadequacy, who tries to manage Gurney’s troubled existence in a manner that might also harness his gifts. Full (sometimes too much) of symbols of oppression and human anonymity, In Zodiac Light is a sound evocation of an artist tragically divorced from his calling.

Simon Baker

The American Future: a History

by Simon Schama

Vintage, £9.99

There is something irresistible about Simon Schama’s writing, despite his attempts to rework the ‘‘great man’’ theory of history into the “great historian” theory of man. Schama stars as prominently in this book as in the accompanying television series. Sometimes this is for the better, as when he recalls watching the 1964 Democratic convention in Atlantic City

as a student reporter. Sometimes – his throwaway boilerplate on Bush and Cheney, for instance – it’s not. But this paean to his adopted country is beautifully done across multiple themes. Jon Swaine

Pompeii:

the Life of a Roman Town

by Mary Beard

Profile, £9.99

We normally think of Pompeii as a city halted in mid-flow, a static Marie Celeste. Mary Beard shows, in this witty, readable account, that it is in fact a city after the inhabitants have packed up and left. She debunks many myths: the aristocratic lady found in a gladiator’s barracks was not there for some rough and tumble, but fleeing for her life. Beard puts the city in its proper historical and geographical context, with all the smells (that of urine from the fulleries being most prevalent), phalluses and pygmies being eaten by hippos that anyone could want. Philip Womack